Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934): The Mask of Birtwistle

Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934)

The Mask of Birtwistle

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934), The Mask of Birtwistle

Donald Macleod explores some of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's most striking music.

Donald Macleod explores some of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's most striking music, including his opera The Mask of Orpheus and Silbury Air.

This week Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle, described as “the most forceful and uncompromisingly original composer of his generation”. We hear his major compositions, broadly in chronological order, and reveal the preoccupations and processes behind a singular music imagination. 

In this episode, Donald Macleod looks at the powerful inspiration Birtwistle gets from mythology and how it drives so much of his music, not just in his many stage works, but permeating his entire output.  They also discuss the music he made whilst living on the Hebridean island of Raasay, and what role landscape plays in his work
Birtwistle has described his music as ‘mechanical pastoral’. This style is heard most clearly in the composer’s favourite piece in his whole output, Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum.


Duets for Storab (Urlar; Stark Pastoral; Crunluath)
The Galliard Ensemble: Kathryn Thomas, Robert Manasse, flutes

Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum
The London Sinfonietta
Elgar Howarth, cond.

The Mask of Orpheus (13th, 14th 15th Arch from Act 2, Scene 2)
Anne-Marie Owens, mezzo-soprano (Persephone)
Jean Rigby, mezzo-soprano (Euridice)
Jon Garrison, tenor (Orpheus)
Omar Ebrahim, baritone (Charon)
BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers
Andrew Davis, Martyn Brabbins, conductors

Silbury Air 
The London Sinfonietta
Elgar Howarth, cond.

Producer: Iain Chambers

Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod meets composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle to talk about his life and music.

This week Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle, described as 'the most forceful and uncompromisingly original composer of his generation'.

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